BROWSE Columns
✕
I want to die, to see
Hade’s abiding autumn this once & only time,
to behold that interminable tramonto
& move meekly beyond the mountain,
remember my first dusk
& long for it.
the moist lotus open
for lack of it,
& I unwitting as the other newborn dead
who bide their time before the bellow
of Charon’s oar, all us lost littered
along Acheron––
our dresses hiked & lurching into Lethe,
stomping our memories into murk,
our mirth fortifying the river’s wine.
I want to die, to see
myself crushed like grapes
the moist lotus open
skins empty & soul shorn
from the body’s pomace
along Acheron—
the simmer of death’s ferment.
ma non ci sta spazia in cielo?
vorrei che Dio mi venga piglià.
yet still I sprout, cornucopial, amongst sullen men carrying their scythed wheat &shucked corn away from their tables into the full mouths of the overfed, working forthe coin that covers their eyes & teaching their children a grim liturgy: “take thesecrusts. fare la scarpetta. polish your plate like a priest combing the chalice for the lastcrumbs of Christ with a splash of His blood.”
Joe Gross is a Flushing-based bookseller, poet, translator, and author of the prize-winning chapbook Lest We All Get Clipped (Ghostbird Press, 2023). His work has been anthologized in Eating Alone (Clotheslines Press, 2023) and The Pearl (Wyeth Renwick, 2023) and has appeared in KtB Magazine, Twin Pies Literary, VIA, The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls, HORNS, petrichor, Four Way Review, and La Piccioletta Barca. He holds an MFA from Queens College, CUNY, where he was co-editor of Armstrong Literary. Find him on Twitter @komradekapybara and @joegrosspoet on Instagram.
